Creating a Prize for the Best Digital Editions / Online Archives

Abstract

Although the web has had a profound impact upon scholarly editing in the humanities, the profession has been slow to recognize digital editions. This paper proposes a prize for an online edition, and then tackles the issues of selecting and judging, including criteria for inclusion, usability, and assessing the work in its critical context. The article provides a useful contribution because no such prize exists, and because discussions about how to critically assess digital editions are sparse. References are drawn from a range of sources including reviews and inside accounts of current projects, studies of scholarly editing, colloquia about digital editions, and studies of usability guidelines.